2025 Eureka Fellow: Pilar Agüero-Esparza

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Pilar Agüero-Esparza is a mixed media artist working in painting and spatial processes through which she explores issues of colorism and social hierarchies while engaging with ideas of materiality, meaning, and the handmade object as entry points for discussions on race, equity, and empathy. She received a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University.

Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues in California, including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum, MACLA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Galería de la Raza, the de Young Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Palo Alto Arts Center, and Cabrillo Gallery at Cabrillo College. She has also exhibited work at the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, KS. In 2017, her work was featured in the exhibition The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility at the Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles as part of the Getty Foundation’s Southern California Initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. In 2019, the U.S.-Mexico Border exhibition traveled to Lille, France as part of the Eldorado Lille3000 arts festival. In 2022, as an artist-in-residence and Lucas Artist Fellow, she was commissioned to create a large-scale outdoor work for the exhibition Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.

She is currently working on a series of large-scale leather paintings as part of her upcoming exhibitions at the Kondos Gallery at Sacramento City College and the Santa Clara University Art Gallery.